Women in Art

Rush and Stevie Nicks, Montage Mountain, June 29/30, 2007

Two concerts this weekend - Rush and Stevie Nicks. Rush was the better show, though Stevie Nicks had some great moments (Rhianna, Landslide, If Anyone Falls). We arrived at Rush a little late, due to terrible traffic, so I missed the first song, which was Limelight. Of all the songs to miss! That one's gonna haunt me.

The Rush setlist (courtesy cygweb):

• Limelight
• Digital Man
  
• Entre Nous
  
• Mission
  
• Freewill
• The Main Monkey Business
• The Larger Bowl
  
• Secret Touch
• Circumstances
  
• Between The Wheels
• Dreamline

Intermission

• Far Cry
• Workin’ Them Angels
• Armor And Sword
  
• Spindrift
• The Way The Wind Blows
• Subdivisions
• Natural Science
• Witch Hunt
  
• Malignant Narcissism
• Drum Solo
• Hope
• Summertime Blues
• The Spirit of Radio
• Tom Sawyer
  

Encore:

• One Little Victory
• A Passage to Bangkok
  
• YYZ

Stevie Nicks was chatty, with lengthy intros at a few spots (it was, after all, a retrospective tour, she reminded us, in support of her Crystal Visions release). Here's an approximate setlist:

• Stand Back
• Enchanted
• If Anyone Falls
• Rhiannon
• Dreams
• Sorcerer
• Gold Dust Woman
• I Need To Know (yes, the Tom Petty song)
  
• Landslide
• How Still My Love
• Edge of Seventeen

Encore:

• Rock and Roll
• Beauty and the Beast (not sure on this one, so if you were there and have a correction, drop it in the comments)
  

Top tips for the lazy environmentalist

Top tips. Also, stop ridiculous CO2-spewing projects like coal-to-oil.

Vista and content protection

If you're a tech geek like me and you haven't read A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection (also known as the Vista suicide note paper), you should (or, if you read far too much and want an easier method of absorbing it, again like me, Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing fame, released it as a podcast).

I'd like to make clear that I despise piracy - you should pay for your content when required, despite how you feel about the RIAA or whatever moral justification you might come up with. Content creators deserve to get paid when they follow a distribution model that expects payment.

But Windows Vista appears to expend inordinate overhead to prevent copying, even if copyright law specifically allows for it under fair use provisions. And since pirates inevitably find ways around DRM protections fairly quickly anyway, the net effect is denying non-technical home users their fair-use rights, while adding ridiculous CPU overhead to the operating system's normal operations (if I want excessive CPU usage, I'll install Norton or McAfee; sigh).

Get out your tinfoil hats

I don't know why this isn't stop-the-presses, we-interrupt-this-program, our-top-story-tonight news - maybe it's the whole X-Files feel of it. Anyway, honey bees are disappearing and nobody knows why. Maybe it's cell phone frequencies zapping their little brains. Maybe aliens are abducting bees for the honey farms on Tralfamadore. Maybe it's simply a beehole in the space-time continuum. So speculate away. Where are Scully and Mulder when we need them?

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut has passed on. He has been my favorite writer for many years and a huge influence. I'm actually currently reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel that reminded me why I love his work so much. In the book,our protagonist, Eliot Rosewater, is a man born into affluence who prefers helping common people as opposed to living in wretched excess, and he's the one people consider insane. Imagine that.

This is really sad news. The man brought us such classics about the human condition:

• Slaughterhouse Five: The novel everyone first mentions when they talk about Vonnegut, and yet not his best work, IMHO.


• Breakfast of Champions: Absolutely one of his best. At the end, Vonnegut himself enters the story and reveals to his character that he, as the writer, controls the character's destiny. I still remember the scene, as the character runs after Vonnegut, yelling "Make me young."


• Cat's Cradle


• Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
  


• Timequake: Pure concept. Absolutely wonderful.


• Deadeye Dick


• Galapagos


• Sirens of Titan


• Palm Sunday

And so many others. Sigh. First Hunter Thompson, and now Kurt Vonnegut.

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

Geography of religion

This is an interesting animation showing a geographical history of religion for the last five-thousand years. Note that it's a spatial representation; it might be interesting to determine a way to show the same data with the numbers represented (I guess some kind of an area diagram plotted over time, but I don't know if you can show the two views simultaneously; I'm thinking something along the lines of Tufte's famous chart showing Napolean's march into Russia in the War of 1812). Anyway, interesting presentation.

Alex Toth Model Sheets

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has some nice Alex Toth Model Sheets, including Herculoids and some things I haven't seen before. Toth had a very crisp, clean style, which I guess made him a natural for animation design. Via Boing Boing.

How Long Does It Take To Catch A Computer Virus?

About eight seconds, according to this article.

Vis digg.

"Which SF writer are you" meme

A meme I stumbled across thanks to Boing Boing determines which SF writer you are. I was hoping for Heinlein, or maybe Burroughs. Guess I'll need to look into this guy:

I am: Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs) A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Alice Cooper still not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Van Halen, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, R.E.M., the Ronettes and Patti Smith. But no Alice Cooper. Sigh. He's gonna be so pissed.

Link (via Digg).

Social Security billions could go to illegal aliens

Via Digg: About to become law is an agreement allowing illegal aliens to get Social Security benefits after only 18 months of employment in the U.S., further burdening a system on the brink of collapse. U.S. citizens must show 10 years, or 40 quarters of job history, to collect benefits.

read more | digg story

Season of giving

Christmas is the season of giving. Don't forget to give to the less fortunate. How much should you give (NY Times online; registration required)? Here's some options, or you can always try Charity Navigator:

• United Nations Friends of the World Food Program
• The Salvation Army
  

How many gallons in a dinosaur?

Did you know that you get 460 gallons of gasoline from a tyrannosaur? Now you do.

Mathematically-challenged Verizon CSRs

This link goes to a fairly funny (though long) exchange between a customer and a Verizon customer service rep over a pricing issue. The customer also started a blog about the whole incident.

The Hero Initiative

The Hero Initiative (formerly ACTOR) is a not-for-profit organization that helps veteran comics professionals who have fallen on hard times.

Ask election victors to help fight poverty

Another of my letters to the editor published in the Republican and Herald. For more info on how you can help fight global poverty, please visit www.one.org. Now. Make with the clickey.

Sending a signal back in time

If only you could. Of course, if it were possible, why hasn't your future self sent you a message to prevent some stupid thing you've done (in last week's The Office, Jim, using pilfered stationary, sent Dwight a fax from "Dwight's future self" alerting him to a potential catastrophe; hilarity ensued).

Via Slashdot (where else do you get good geek news about reverse causality?).

No one was precisely sure where it had come from. Everyone knew precisely where it hit. It struck a marine who was peering out of the first vehicle’s gun turret. He collapsed.

With Skill, Prayer, and Fury (from the New York Times)

Stealing of an election?

The mysterious voting machine bugs that somehow always seem to favor Republicans.